Our June lecture will be given by Ofer Tchernichovski on Balanced imitation sustains song culture in zebra finches. 

When birds learn songs, they balance their imitation performance in a manner that sustains a rich and stable culture of song repertoires.

Songbirds acquire songs by imitation, as humans do speech. One imitation can be persistently accurate in some families, but poor in others. This is not attributed to genetic differences, but because pupils of tutors with low song diversity make more improvisations. In this manner a frequency dependent balanced imitation prevents extinction of rare song elements and the overabundance of common ones, promoting repertoire diversity within groups while constraining drift across groups, which together prevents the collapse of vocal culture into either complete uniformity or chaos.

Professor of Psychology Ofer Tchernichovski has served as the primary investigator or co-investigator in numerous studies of birdsong published in Current Biology (2016), Nature (2013), Neuroscience (2012), and Science (2001). Most of his publications address mechanisms of developmental vocal learning in songbirds. He studies song development across generations and discovered how vocal culture is established de novo under controlled conditions.

His lab, the Laboratory of Vocal Learning at Hunter College, CUNY, pioneered quantitative analysis of entire vocal development in songbirds. They discovered how vocal sounds differentiate during early development and how sleep affects vocal learning from moment to moment and over development. They advanced techniques for tracking the development of vocal combinatorial capacity in songbirds and in human infants. The lab developed the vocal robot method for studying the coordination of calls in zebra finches, and those working in the lab have vast experience in tracking vocal learning in songbirds, and in controlling social environments of zebra finches during song development. Since 2001, Tchernichovski’s lab has shared birdsong analysis techniques with the community. Over the years, they combined those tools to build software called Sound Analysis Pro, which is now used by many labs.